Temporal Fluidity and Disease-Time in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey

Meg Jianing Zhang

Given this paper’s interest in temporal fluidity, it only makes sense to begin at the end. In the last episode of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Parson Yorick finds himself in a matter of great delicacy. En route to Lyons, the peripatetic philosopher stops at a “little decent kind of an inn by the road side” (ASJ OUP 101). Eager to tuck in to his “supper,” a “good fire,” and his “bed-chamber,” Yorick is dismayed to learn he will have to share his lodgings with a prudish Lady from Piedmont and her servant girl (101). The room itself consists of “two good beds…and a closet within the room which held another” (101). Tension arises when Yorick and the Lady must decide who is sleeping where, and of course, how they will uphold their good manners. During their meal, they draft up the following treaty: the right side of the bed-chamber, its cot closest to the fire, is naturally entrusted to the Madame. The canopy of her bed, transparent and flimsy, will be doctored with corking pins to preserve her modesty through the night. Monsieur Yorick is delegated to the other side of the room. He must sleep in his clothes, and not say a word besides his prayers after the candles are blown out. The lady’s fille de chambre is stuck with the “damp cold closet” (102).

As soon as they are enacted, these well-intentioned settlements promptly fall by the wayside. First, the sonic barrier is ruined by Yorick’s loud “ejaculation,” “O my God!” (104) after hours of tossing and turning, unable to sleep in his uncomfortable outerwear. Then the curtains, the physical boundary between the Madame and Monsieur, are torn asunder by the Lady, who is reasonably disrupted by Yorick’s verbal eruption. The twenty-year-old fille de chambre, in what can only be described as a Hail Mary effort at preserving decorum, creeps between Yorick and her mistress, and inserts her body as a partition. As the maid positions herself accordingly, Yorick reaches out, stretching his hand forward to reassure the Lady of his decency, when: “I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s” (104).

This is how Sterne’s final novel ends – not with a bang, or even a whimper. Unlike his nine-volume Tristram Shandy, whose plot seemingly goes on and on, and whose protagonist tells and re-tells the farcical trials and tribulations of his family, A Sentimental Journey ends after two volumes in medias res. Readers are not even privy to one of Sterne’s celebrated long dashes. The text’s conclusion, if such a word can be used in this case, seems empty, absent, and definitively indeterminate.

That is, until one considers the actual final words of A Sentimental Journey. Sterne’s unfinished novel ends not with the words, “Fille de Chambre’s,” but rather with the proclamation: “END OF VOL. II” (104).

Stitching these phrases together presents readers with a radically different ending, one whose ribald undertones are far more fitting for the Shandean scribe. Yorick, in his swift gesture of reassurance, catches “hold of the Fille de Chambre’s END.” In other words, in his attempt to affirm his gentle countenance, he instead fondles the young maid’s bottom.

How are readers to interpret this multi-faceted ending? On the one hand, Yorick’s journey across Continental Europe underwhelmingly ends here, the protagonist suspended with his hand stuck out in protest. On the other hand, Yorick lands his target perfectly, giving in once again to his temptations, reproducing ad infinitum the bawdy misadventures he inadvertently undertakes on his sentimental journey. Why does Sterne’s text end this way? And does the unfinished nature of the novel definitively terminate or forever prolong Yorick’s perambulatory encounters? To address these questions, this paper reads A Sentimental Journey with Sterne’s biography in mind, not to craft an analysis overwrought by historical circumstance, but to elucidate and incorporate Clark Lawlor’s notion of “disease-time.” Sterne’s life-long experiences with consumption and syphilis influenced not only the direction of his writing process, but that of his creations. A Sentimental Journey, with its unpredictable stops and starts, its bumpy carriage rides, and its ambiguously abrupt ending, embodies the principles of disease-time: irregularity, chronicity, interruption, and innovation.

One vector through which to explore the text’s ending is the author’s own ending. For the majority of his life, Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) was celebrated more for his sermons than for his creative fiction. Sterne held a long and relatively successful clerical position in a small parish in Yorkshire. It was only towards the end of his life that he slowly but surely produced what would become his magnum opus: the highly experimental, Rabelaisian, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Tristram Shandy was critically acclaimed during Sterne’s life, earning the author literary fame that transcended his reputation of vicar. Blatantly adopting the persona of one of the characters, Parson Yorick, Sterne published a collection of his sermons under the title, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick while he was still in London’s limelight. The fictional Yorick, who dies in Volume I of Tristram Shandy, not only reappears as a consequence of the novel’s non-linear storytelling but is wholly revived in the final years of Sterne’s life. Upon returning from his own travels in Southern France and the Mediterranean, Sterne planned to write four volumes of Yorick’s adventures: A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.

What was eventually published, however, was not only two of the four volumes, but merely Yorick’s experiences in Northern and Central France. What of Italy? What of the latter two volumes? Indeed, what inspired Sterne to write A Sentimental Journey is what ultimately prevented him from realizing his entire project.

The Advertisement in the first edition of A Sentimental Journey reads as follows:

The Author begs leave to acknowledge to his Subscribers, that they have a further claim upon him for Two Volumes more than these delivered to them now, and which nothing but ill health could have prevented him, from having ready along with these

The Work will be completed and delivered to the Subscribers early the next Winter (ASJ 1768; emphases added). 1

Sterne was unable to realize his intended four volumes because of his chronic illnesses. After his two volumes were published in late February 1768, Sterne died three weeks later, bedridden in his flat on Bond Street, on the 18th of March. Sterne lived with tuberculosis, what was contemporarily known as consumption, for almost his entire adult life. And towards the end of his life, he also suffered severely from what was likely the venereal disease, syphilis.

Like most well-to-do and ailing Englishmen of his time, Sterne retreated to Southern France and Italy for extended durations, believing that the good air and balmy climes would do his illness good.1 In his correspondences to his dearest friends, Sterne communicates the traumatic ruptures he experienced from consumption, his endless pursuits for treatment, and his eventual wasting away.

To John Hall-Stevenson, whom Sterne casts as “Eugenius” in both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, Sterne writes:

About a week or ten days before my wife arrived at Paris I had the same accident I had at Cambridge, of breaking a vessel in my lungs. It happen’d in the night, and I bled the bed full, and finding in the morning I was likely to bleed to death, I sent immediately for a surgeon to bleed me at both arms – this saved me (Florida Sterne 285).

Sterne’s account of his tuberculosis to Hall-Stevenson disrupts modern readers’ conceptions of the disease. Consumption is not merely an illness that prompts its host to cough up a smattering of blood into her handkerchief, but rather a paroxysm-inducing curse that coerces its victim to drown in his blood.

To David Garrick, eighteenth-century London’s much-admired actor, Sterne stipulates: I laugh ‘till I cry, and in the same tender moments cry ‘till I laugh. I Shandy it more than ever, and verily do believe, that by mere Shandeism sublimated by a laughter-loving people, I fence as much against infirmities, as I do by the benefit of air and climate (253).

From this excerpt, it is evident that for Sterne, healthy environments were not the only benefits of travelling. Instead, another means of healing derives from his own creation, “Shandeism,” which is to say, half-crazed, temporally disjunctive, hilarious, and highly suggestive moments of storytelling. In order to heal, or at least to distract, Sterne laughs until he cries and simultaneously cries until he laughs. Through Yorick’s misadventures, Sterne encourages his readers to do the same.

To Eliza Draper, the wife of a member of the East India Company with whom Sterne was obsessed in the last year of his life, he laments:

…awoke in the most acute pain – Something Eliza is wrong with me – you should be ill out of Sympathy – and yet you are too ill already (ASJ OUP 110).

Consumption significantly impacted Sterne’s physical ability to sit up and write. In The Journal to Eliza, which Sterne wrote at the same time as A Sentimental Journey, he describes days where he is so beleaguered that he can barely hold his pen and write his journal entries, let alone his creative fiction.

Though Sterne’s biography should never over-determine scholarly readings of A Sentimental Journey, it can be critically generative with the work of Clark Lawlor in mind. Lawlor primarily constrains what he calls, “disease-time” to Tristram Shandy (a work that explicitly outlines every character’s consumptive state). This paper argues that disease-time is equally, if not more, applicable to the production and development of Sterne’s last novel.

Lawlor emphasizes the irregularity and chronic nature of disease-time. For Sterne and his contemporary consumptives, there was no predictable progression for the disease. Sometimes tuberculosis would kill its host almost immediately. (A few decades down the line, the Romantic poet, John Keats, would endure the disease for only a year, before travelling to Rome and dying there at the young age of 25.) Sometimes, however, such as in the case of Sterne, consumption could last for a lifetime. Sterne lived with the disease for over three decades. Consumption, in other words, was a beast that could trot and gallop. Its host, more often than not, had little control over the reins.

Disease-time, Lawlor notes, manifests in Sterne’s literature. Death appears in Tristram Shandy as a mistaken caller, never knowing the right time or place to call. Interactions with Death are not sombre or morbid. Instead, they are construed as awkward and embarrassing accidents (Lawlor, “Fashionable and Unfashionable Consumption” 55). Death may signify the end of narrative time, Lawlor explains (55). Yorick’s death in Tristram Shandy is marked with the novel’s signature black pages (Figures A and B in the Appendix). Scholars have argued tirelessly over the significance of these black pages. One reading is that death and disease command a sudden halt in narrative. Perhaps anticipating Yorick’s “end” in A Sentimental Journey, the black pages gesture toward an absence and termination of meaning. And yet, the narrative continues for eight more volumes after these black pages (with Yorick’s return). As Sterne’s revival of Yorick suggests, notions of d eath and disease are equally generative – not only in affirming Sterne’s self-narratives, but in crafting his literary production.

For Sterne, the diseases “worked” to construct both himself and his characters as men of sensibility and sentiment, in part, Lawlor explains, through “self-fashioning of his and his characters’ diseases and partly through the long historical discourse of genius and piety associated with consumption and melancholia” (Lawlor, “Fame and Fashionable Disease” 520). Sterne was regarded for wearing his black clerical robes on a regular basis. In a secular context, Sterne’s outfits participated in the culturally-celebrated narrative of the “Renaissance melancholic,” a figure creative, prolific, and pious in his literary pursuits (523). Yorick is likewise notorious of his sartorial singularities. He packs his “dozen shifts and a black pair of silk breeches” and his dark coat at the beginning of the novel as he sets sail for Calais (ASJ OUP 3). This exact wardrobe is reconjured in the novel’s last episode, “The Case of Delicacy.”

To return to the last episode of the novel, one of the reasons Yorick is able to sleep in the main chamber of the bedroom and not the closet is because of his consumptive cough, which he intentionally bolsters: “a damp cold closet, with a half-dismantled window shutter, and with a window which had neither glass or oil paper in it to keep out the tempest of the night. I did not endeavour to stifle my cough when the lady gave a peep into it” (102; emphases added). There is some reason to believe that Yorick in A Sentimental Journey is as ill as he was in Tristram Shandy. And yet, Yorick does not waste away from the disease as he does in Tristram Shandy. In fact, he barely makes his condition know, unless of course, it can benefit him. In “The Case of Delicacy,” Yorick uses his terminal illness as a subtle means of getting a half-decent place to rest. Sterne turns a sombre idea, a disease that guarantees termination, into the very catalyst of bawdy mischief to come.

Disease-time is all about interruptions, stops and starts, circular motions, elusive temporalities, and temporal fluidities. Fully aware of the outcome of his consumption, Sterne uses his disease to bolster his reputation as a writer, and to cultivate Shandeism in his literary works, a quality that makes light of serious subjects, that celebrates the ridiculous, the ribald, and the mischievous. As the inconclusive final episode of A Sentimental Journey demonstrates, endings in disease-time are simultaneously abrupt and unresolved, but also inexhaustibly signified. For both Sterne and Yorick then, disease and death are not temporal endpoints, but perpetual moments of hilarity, sentiment, and temporal potential.

Appendix

Figures A and B: The Black Mourning Pages of Tristram Shandy, Vol. I (1759)

Works Cited

The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. Volume VII: The Letters, Part I: 1739-1764. Edited by Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd, University Press of Florida, 2009.

Lawlor, Clark. “‘Halfe Dead and rotten at the Coare my Lord!’: Fashionable and Unfashionable Consumption, From Early Modern to Enlightenment,” Disease and Death in EighteenthCentury Literature and Culture, edited by A. Ingram and L.W. Dickson, Springer, 2016.

Lawlor, Clark. “Laurence Sterne, Fame and Fashionable Disease,” Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, 2017, pp. 519-535.

Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. 1st ed, Printed for T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, in the Strand, 1768. ECCO. Accessed 10 March 2021.

Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings. Edited by Ian Jack and Tim Parnell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.